The Divine Cities Trilogy: City of Stairs, City of Blades, and City of Miracles, With an Excerpt From Foundryside

by Robert Jackson Bennett

  Sigrud shuts his eye as he tries to move past this moment. Then his toe catches the edge of a stair, and he stumbles.

  He crashes to the stairs, the spear falling from his grasp. His breast howls with pain. Everything hurts, every piece of him is torment, and though he tries he can’t push himself back up.

  Sigrud sobs, weary and miserable. “I can’t,” he whispers. “I can’t do it. I can’t.”

  He shuts his eye, knowing that he’s failed, knowing what it means. The world will not simply vanish—it will be as if it never was.

  He opens his eye to see it coming, to see the world dissolve and the abyss take him. And he sees he is not alone.

  There is someone standing on the stairs above him.

  Sigrud looks up.

  It is a woman, mid-thirties, dressed in leather boots and a sealskin coat. On the breast of this coat is an insignia—the insignia of the Southern Dreyling Company, accompanied by a small gear. The woman looks down on him, her blond hair bright in the light of the figure above her, her blue eyes passionate behind her glasses.

  She says something. Sigrud is now so faint he can’t hear what she says. But he can see it’s three words, and he knows they’re words she spoke to him long ago, when she declared her life’s purpose to him, a bold statement of grim, determined hope:

  One big push.

  Sigrud nods, weeping. “All right,” he says. “All right.”

  He gathers himself, rolls over once more. Then he works his left hand into position and pushes himself back up onto his knees. He reaches down and grasps the shaft of the spear, which luckily has not fallen the rest of the way down. Then he hauls himself back up to his feet, one last time.

  One step more. Then another, and another.

  In each moment, I thought of what I’d lost, he thinks.

  Another step, another.

  Of what was done to me, and how to inflict my own justice on this world.

  Another, another, another.

  But I know better now, here at the end.

  And then finally, he comes to her.

  The woman who hangs in the air has the look of Tatyana Komayd to her, and a dash of Malwina Gogacz: there is the small nose, the weak chin, the pugnacious mouth. She floats about twenty feet past the edge of the staircase, her hands lifted, her eyes turned to the heavens. Her eyes shine brightly, their pure white luminescence lancing up past the top of the tower. Yet her face is twisted in sorrow and grief, and her cheeks are wet with tears: a creature, however Divine, overwhelmed with despair.

  He knows that look. He looked the same way when he lost his father, his family, his daughter, his friend.

  And then he understands: it’s a loop, an endless loop of injured children, growing old but keeping their pain fresh and new, causing yet more injury and starting the whole cycle over again.

  He looks at the goddess, and sees only the young girl who stared up at the moon a few nights ago, and declared the dead a mystery to her.

  “Death is no place to look for meaning, Taty,” he says to her. He tosses the spear away, letting it roll down the stairs. He slowly walks back along the stairs, until he backs up to the wall of the tower. “You told me that.”

  He looks at the gap. Twenty feet from the stairs to her. Can he make it? Even in such an injured state?

  I will have to.

  He crouches down, positions his feet, readies himself.

  “I will remind you,” he whispers.

  He runs along the step, a hobbling, drunken, halting run, but still fast, still strong.

  Sigrud comes to the edge.

  He leaps.

  He soars out, arm extended, the frozen city of Bulikov below him, the endless dark tower stretching above.

  He flies to her, reaches out, touches her shoulder, grabs her and holds her close, and then…

  All the moments crash in around him.

  * * *

  —

  Sigrud sits upon a white plane.

  The plane is vast and never-ending, and though he doesn’t understand it, he knows the plane stretches in all directions, all at once. Yet still, he sits upon it, nude and cross-legged, his scarred, bruised, wounded body bared to the light that seems to come from all directions.

  Something shifts around him. He realizes that this plane, this place, exists in the palm of someone’s hand—someone inconceivably vast.

  “HOW DARE YOU,” says a voice.

  Things keep shifting. And then she raises him up to her eyes.

  Sigrud sees the goddess before him, holding him before her gaze, all of time swirling in her grasp. Her eyes are filled with dying suns and the howl of a thousand storms, with a thousand raindrops falling upon a thousand leaves, a thousand whispered words and a thousand laughs and a thousand tears.

  Her face twists in naked fury. “HOW DARE YOU INTERRUPT ME,” says the goddess. “HOW DARE YOU DEFY TIME.”

  Sigrud looks at the goddess, and blinks slowly. “I do not defy it,” he says. “I am simply fulfilling a promise I made to a young girl not that long ago.”

  “I AM NO LONGER SHE,” thunders the goddess. “I AM MUCH, MUCH MORE THAN SHE EVER WAS, THAN SHE EVER COULD BE.”

  “And yet,” says Sigrud, “she was far wiser than you are now.”

  The goddess stares at him, outraged. “YOU KNOW NOTHING OF WHAT YOU SPEAK. I WILL REMAKE TIME, REMAKE THE WORLD. I WILL MAKE A JUST WORLD, A MORAL WORLD, A WORLD FREE OF VIOLATIONS AND WRONGS AND PUNISHMENTS.”

  “Tatyana,” says Sigrud softly, “Malwina…How many times have we been here before?”

  “THIS HAS NEVER HAPPENED BEFORE. NEVER HAS TIME AWOKEN. NEVER HAS TIME ITSELF REFORGED CREATION.”

  “Perhaps not,” says Sigrud. “But how many times has one person performed an unspeakable atrocity, all in the name of making the world better? The Divinities, the Kaj, Vinya, Nokov…And now you? Will you join their ranks?”

  “I AM FAR MORE POWERFUL THAN THEY EVER WERE!” shouts the goddess. “I WILL DO IT RIGHT THIS TIME!”

  “I am sure they said the same.”

  “YOU DO NOT UNDERSTAND ANY OF THIS,” she says.

  “You are wrong,” says Sigrud. “I have done the same. I have done what you are about to do.”

  The goddess hesitates, confused.

  “When my daughter died,” Sigrud says quietly, “I was filled with fury and grief, and I killed those soldiers. It felt righteous. It felt just. But it was monstrous, beyond monstrous. For all my righteousness, I made the world worse.”

  “PERHAPS THEY DESERVED IT,” says the goddess. “OR PERHAPS THEY DIDN’T. THAT IS BUT ONE OF MANY SINS THAT I WILL RIGHT. I WILL MAKE A WORLD WHERE WE GET WHAT IS JUST, WHAT WE DESERVE.”

  “You cannot,” says Sigrud. “You are as powerless as I was. The world is written upon your heart just as it is mine. Pick up all the weapons of all realities and use them all as best you can, Taty, but you cannot inflict virtue on the world. You cannot.”

  The goddess stares at him. “YOU WHO HAVE SUFFERED. YOU WHO HAVE BEEN WRONGED AND VIOLATED. YOU WHO HAVE KILLED AND MURDERED AND MADE WAR UPON THIS WORLD. YOU SAY NOW THAT THERE IS NO JUSTICE?”

  “Not like this,” he says. “Not like this. And I should know. I lost precious things in my life. I suffered. And I thought that suffering made me righteous. But I was wrong, Taty. I tried to teach you this. But how could I teach you this if I had not learned these lessons myself?” He bows his head. “I…I saw my life laid out upon the stairs,” he whispers. “I gave so many of my own years to wrath, and I stole so many years from other people. How selfish I was. How many wonders I ignored….If only I had looked beyond my pain. If only I had laid aside my torment, and chosen to live anew. But I did not, and I lost so much. Yet you will lose so, so much more if you do this.”

  The goddess hesitates. He can see it in her face, just a flash of
it—a look reminiscent of one he saw on Taty’s face, and Malwina’s: of anguish, of sorrow, and yet the desire to do right.

  “Tatyana, Malwina,” he says. “Let go of your embers, before you are burned too deeply.”

  “I WANT TO MAKE THINGS RIGHT,” she says.

  “Shara Komayd once had this chance,” says Sigrud. “A chance to draw from her pain, and force her will upon the world. She chose instead to give people the tools to make their own worlds better. She lived, and died, to do this. I know she taught you this, Tatyana Komayd. And I know you do not wish to lose what she taught you.”

  The goddess looks away, thinking. She trembles. “I…I JUST WISH I COULD HAVE BEEN THERE FOR HER,” she says.

  “I know,” Sigrud says.

  “I WISH I COULD HAVE SAID GOOD-BYE,” she says.

  “I know,” says Sigrud. “I know. I know, I know, I know.”

  The goddess raises her other hand, and things begin to change.

  The vast white plane begins to blur and whirl and shift, collapsing in on the point just above the palm of her hand. As it does, the goddess transforms: she is no longer the tall, towering being adorned with all moments of all things. She shrinks, she grows younger, imperfect, until finally she is a small Continental girl who is not quite Malwina Gogacz, and not quite Tatyana Komayd either.

  The white plane collapses until it is a bright, bright star in her palm. She looks at him, her eyes full of tears, and looks at the star.

  “I don’t want this,” she says quietly. “I don’t want to be this anymore.” She lifts the star to her lips and gives a tiny puff.

  The star dissolves like the seeds of a dandelion and goes dancing through the air, all these tiny, soft lights scattered to the winds.

  The girl bows her head and bursts into tears. “I miss her, Sigrud,” she says. “I miss her so much.”

  Sigrud says, “I know.”

  Everything vanishes.

  * * *

  —

  Sigrud falls.

  He’s falling, but not at the speed of someone tumbling through the air: rather, he senses he’s being carefully lowered.

  He opens his eye.

  The girl—Taty? Malwina? He’s not sure—holds him in her arms as if he were a child. Together they slowly float down to earth, and as they do the black tower unravels around them, dissipating and dissolving.

  He’s weak now, terribly weak. He’s shivering, he’s so cold. Yet he manages to look at the face of the girl holding him.

  She’s weeping, her cheeks covered in tears. “Go away, go away,” she whispers. “All of this can go away.”

  They land as light as a thrush upon a branch. Suddenly Ivanya is there, staring at them.

  “What in hells?” says Ivanya. “What…What just happened? Where’s Nokov?”

  Sigrud tries to smile and say, “Ivanya—you’re back,” yet he has no air for it.

  The girl gently lays him on the ground. As she does, he looks at his left hand and the scar there, the miracle that’s dominated his life.

  The scar is fading away, the lines unraveling like the threads of an old sweater.

  I thought my sorrow was a weapon, he thinks, watching it.

  It is just the barest whisper of a line now.

  Yet all this time, it was simply a burden. And how I suffered because of it.

  The scar is almost gone.

  Pain seizes him. He begins convulsing. He feels the blood flow from his wound double, triple, a waterfall of blood from his right breast.

  “What’s going on?” says Ivanya, alarmed.

  Sigrud is trembling, so he can’t answer her, but he knows: the miracle that kept him alive for so long is abandoning him. He’s becoming a common, mortal man, as susceptible to wounds as any other.

  “No!” cries the girl. “No, no!” She snatches at his left palm like he’s got some treasure hidden there, then rips something out—something black and fragile, like a spiderweb. She crushes it, and slaps it to the wound on his right breast. His wound screams in pain, and he feels something slip inside him, writhing under his skin.

  Then things go dark.

  The older I get, the more I think human history is just combinations and recombinations of inequalities.

  For over a thousand years the very, very few on the Continent had absolute control not just of the world, but of reality.

  The Kaj changed that, of course. But then Saypur held all the purse strings of all the world, and a wealthy Saypuri elite had the most say over who loosened or tightened them.

  I like to think I helped loosen the purse strings, just a little. But freedom and human happiness has a direct relationship to the number of people who have power over their own world, their own lives. Far too many people still have no say in how they live.

  The more that power is dispersed, the more that will change.

  —LETTER FROM FORMER PRIME MINISTER ASHARA KOMAYD TO UPPER HOUSE MINORITY LEADER TURYIN MULAGHESH, 1732

  Far away from Bulikov, in one of the provinces surrounding Ghaladesh, Sharma Muhajan stops and looks up.

  Sharma is not rich, so she was in the middle of churning her own butter, a long, exhausting process. But then things seemed to…pause very strangely. Like things froze, just for a second. Yet now it’s gone.

  A slight breeze wafts through her house. It’s curiously warm. But it makes her shake herself, and remember what she’s doing.

  She goes back to her work, then fetches more milk for the churner. She sighs as she looks into the bucket of milk. It’s a pitiful amount, not enough to make what she needs, but she supposes it’ll have to do.

  Sharma begins pouring the milk into the churner, staring into space and thinking about how, or rather if, they’ll make it through the month. Then she jumps, alarmed by the feeling of coldness in her sandals.

  She looks down. The churner has overflowed. Milk is spreading across her floor in a dingy puddle.

  Sharma frowns, bewildered, and looks into the bucket of milk. It’s the same amount—the same small, pitiful amount at the bottom—yet somehow it has overflowed her big churner.

  Curious, she thinks, then walks over to a big pot, and tries to pour out the milk.

  But she can’t pour it out. Because the milk just keeps coming. And coming. And coming.

  And coming.

  * * *

  —

  In Voortyashtan, far to the north, Mads Hoeverssen frowns as he tries to figure out what in the world is wrong with his automobile. Something somewhere is not draining right, he’s sure of it, which is blocking one of the fuel lines. But it’s just a matter of trying to figure out what is not draining right. If only he could get past that damn shaft here, on the side of the engine block here…

  Then things pause for a moment. An odd little stutter, it feels like. And it’s gone.

  A warm breeze flows across his face. He shakes himself and returns to his work, trying to get that shaft to budge, but it…

  Squeak.

  Mads stares. The shaft gives way to his touch as if it were made of soft cheese, bending perfectly.

  He peers at the shaft. He realizes that what he’s done—however in the hells it is that he’s done it—is very bad, bad enough that the whole damn auto might not work.

  Then, as if it heard his very thought, the shaft pops back into its original form with a squeak.

  Mads peers at it again. He rubs his eyes. Then he slides out from under his auto, and thinks.

  He looks at the dent at the edge of the driver’s door, which he’s never taken the time to get rid of.

  With a clunk, the metal pops out and smooths itself over.

  “Oh my word,” whispers Mads.

  * * *

  —

  In Taalvashtan, in the southwest region of the Continent, a young boy chasing
a ball accidentally runs up a wall, pauses as he realizes what’s happened, and bursts into tears, terrified. His parents, baffled, will have little idea of how to get him down, but they will eventually succeed. They may regret it later though, when their son realizes he can also run across ceilings.

  In Navashtra, in Saypur, a young girl obeys a strange impulse and sings a song to the stones at the nearby quarry. She and the rest of her family, who are picnicking nearby, stare in fear and confusion as the stones slowly roll down the slopes to spell the words: THANK YOU, THAT WAS LOVELY.

  In the Dreyling Shores, an old woman looks up and nearly has a heart attack as she sees her niece casually walking across the empty sky above the seas, laughing hysterically, waving her arms in mimicry of the nearby seagulls, who are no less alarmed than the old woman.

  All of these aberrations—these and the thousands of others occurring across Saypur, the Continent, and the Dreyling Shores—are preceded by two things: the first is the strange pause, as if the world was frozen for a fleeting second; and then a warm breeze flooding through, touching people’s faces.

  As one very young boy who has just discovered he can walk through wooden walls puts it, “It’s like there were stars in the breeze. And then the breeze put them in our heads.”

  * * *

  —

  In Ghaladesh, the Military Council’s meeting with Prime Minister Gadkari and her cabinet is not going well. Mostly because the Military Council, despite being the Military Council and thus being very well informed, has very little understanding of what’s going on.

  First there were the reports about the tower around Bulikov, and the giant black Divine thing that walked up the stairs inside. The Military Council had thought this was another Continental insurrection—except that the Continentals seemed just as surprised and terrified by it as everyone else.

  Then there were the reports of former prime minister Ashara Komayd being sighted multiple times in the streets of Bulikov, which was very puzzling, as everyone knew she was quite dead.